Page 25 of Hellfire to Come (Infernal Regions for the Unprepared #5)

Chapter Twenty-Five

brOOKLYN

The door creaked open like it resented us returning.

My hand hovered over the doorknob, fighting a weird feeling that the ground under my feet was shifting. But that can’t be a bad omen, can it? We were long overdue for some good news, for something nice to befall us.

The house was quiet, you could say a bit too quiet.

Not the kind of silence that followed sleep or stillness, but the brittle hush that wrapped around guilt and grief.

I stepped inside slowly, clutching Alice’s glasses like a lifeline, the weight of the last twenty-four hours still clinging to my bones.

My boots scuffed the floor with every step, and behind me, Dominic’s presence followed like a second spine, rigid, watchful, wound tight with the same unease thrumming through me.

The scent of rosemary and faint blood hung in the air. Not fresh. Faded. Echo’s attempts at warding, probably. Or maybe her attempt at helping Alice.

Dear gods, Alice.

My steps quickened. I was halfway to the stairs before movement caught my eye. A shadow detaching from the hallway near the living room. Slow. Hesitant.

Samir.

He was standing partially in the dark, hair a disheveled mess, eyes shadowed and bloodshot. His clothes were wrinkled, his posture a far cry from the confident arrogance he usually wore like a second skin. He looked like something that had been gnawed on from the inside out.

“Planning to keep sulking in the hallway until the house burns down around you?” I asked, voice cold as steel, the annoyance from his stupid behavior drilling a hole in my brain.

He flinched. Actually flinched.

“You’re back,” he said, like he wasn’t sure if it was real. “Alice…she’s awake.”

“No thanks to you, she’s not.”

The air turned sharp. Behind me, I could feel Dominic’s energy shift. He sharply focused on Samir, on alert, coiled tight, already reading the room with deadly precision.

Samir’s mouth opened, then closed again. I stepped forward.

“Speak,” I said. “Or I start pulling confessions out of you the hard way. I can feel you’re not telling us something crucial, and I’m about ready to physically get it out of you. Don’t make me force you to tell the truth.”

“I…” He swallowed. “I couldn’t find her.”

“What?” the Atua was talking erratically, as if the language was a foreign thing his tongue couldn’t quite catch.

“Alice,” he croaked. “When they took her. I tried to find her. I really did. But I couldn’t trace her magic. And when I realized what he’d done to her…” He grabbed fistfuls of hair and started yanking on it. “I…” He trailed off, jaw trembling, eyes darting everywhere but at me.

Dominic stepped forward, and I instinctively raised a hand. “Don’t.”

“He’s lying,” Dominic growled. “I can smell it on him.”

“No,” Samir whispered, wiping his mouth with the back of a trembling hand, dark strands of hair dangling from between his fingers. “I’m not lying. I couldn’t find her. But that’s not... that’s not what I meant.” His shoulders sagged. “I’m the reason they found us. I told them where we’d be.”

The words were so quiet, they barely registered. But when they did, all the blood left in my body drained to my feet and a loud buzzing started in my ears.

My breath caught.

“What did you just say?” my blood rushed through my veins back up making my whole body tingle and it thundered in my ears.

His hands twitched at his sides. “I told the Council. Or... Frederic, at least. About the location where we would attack. About the safe house, too.”

“You what?” Dominic roared, stepping forward like a storm given form.

I slammed a hand into his chest before he could move another inch. “Don’t,” I hissed. “Let him finish.”

Samir’s face crumpled. “I didn’t think they’d take her!” he cried. “He said if I gave them the location, he’d spare you. That’s what he said. You were the one they wanted. You’re the threat. The human was never part of the deal.”

“You sold us out to save me?” My voice cracked with disbelief.

His eyes met mine, and there it was, raw, pitiful, all-consuming guilt. “Yes,” he rasped. “You were going to die, Brooklyn. I couldn’t…I made a promise…I couldn’t let that happen. I thought…”

“You thought wrong.” Dominic’s voice was deadly quiet now. “And you endangered all of us. You betrayed Alice. Rowan. You nearly cost me everything, you dumb motherfucker. Brooklyn almost died to help Alice.”

Samir looked at me again, like there was some absolution he still believed he might receive.

I shook my head. “You don’t get to say it was out of loyalty. You don’t get to make that call. You chose to trade blood for your own peace of mind so you can keep believing the delusional reality that you are some kind of a savior to me. Disgusting.”

He took a step toward me.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare come closer.” With strength I didn’t know I had I pushed down the bile raising up my esophagus.

The weight of Samir’s confession didn’t hit me like a blow. It didn’t shatter me or set my blood roaring with vengeance. Instead, it settled, cold, dense, inevitable…like winter fog rolling in after a sleepless night.

The silence that followed his words was suffocating.

I felt it in my teeth, in my lungs, in the hollows behind my ribs where breath once lived freely.

I waited for the fury to come. For the instinct to rip him apart for what he had done.

For the betrayal he had carved like a brand into the fragile trust we’d once built.

But it didn’t come.

What came instead was worse.

Resignation.

Somehow, on a level I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, I’d known.

I’d felt the rot spreading under the surface every time Samir averted his eyes, every time he offered silence when we needed truth.

I had told myself because I needed to believe it, that he was still different from the Council that had tried to own me, use me, destroy me.

That maybe he was the one who had seen past the monsters they painted us to be.

But that belief had always hung by a thread.

Now it snapped, quietly, without ceremony.

I stared at him, and it was like staring at a ruin long since collapsed; Something that had already crumbled, only now I could see it for what it truly was.

He didn’t look back. Not fully. His eyes were rimmed red, not from tears but from lack of sleep, from whatever devils he’d been wrestling in the dark.

His hand twitched at his side. A nervous tick. His shoulders had slumped inward, like his spine couldn’t bear the weight of what he’d done. He was barely holding himself together, as if his very breath was stitched by guilt and unraveling by the second.

“I never meant for it to be her,” he said again, his voice fraying. “I was trying to save you.”

I blinked at him, stunned by how quiet my own thoughts had become. “No,” I said softly. “You were trying to save yourself from watching me die. That’s not the same.”

Samir’s lips parted, but no denial came. His throat worked like he was swallowing glass.

Behind me, the heat radiating off of Dominic might as well have been a furnace.

I could feel the storm in him, the coiled tension rippling through his muscles, the unspoken promise of violence vibrating in every breath.

But he held still, barely. For me. For the promises I wrung out of him when we were skin to skin and he was vulnerable and raw.

I should have been ashamed of the manipulation but I wasn’t.

I could’ve let Dominic tear him apart. I could’ve said a word, and it would’ve been done before Samir had time to blink. But I didn’t. And what unnerved me more than anything was that I didn’t want to.

I didn’t want his blood.

Because there was no satisfaction in vengeance when all it confirmed was your worst fear. That no matter how far you ran, no matter how carefully you chose your allies, they still found ways to betray you.

Samir dropped to his knees.

Not dramatically. Not as a plea. But because, I think, his legs simply gave out. He stared at the floor like it could offer him some absolution. Like the cracks in the wood might swallow him whole if he looked hard enough.

“I stayed in my room,” he whispered. “Because I couldn’t face her. Or you. I heard her screaming in my dreams. I felt it, I felt everything like it was done to me. I knew what they were doing to her although I had no clue where she was. And I knew it was my fault.”

Dominic growled low in his throat, a sound that raised every hair on my neck.

I held up a hand again. Not for Samir’s sake. For mine.

Samir kept going, almost feverish now. “I went to Frederic because I thought it would be clean. They can have the demons and leave us alone. That I could make a trade, keep you safe, and no one would know. I thought I was in control. But he was never after you…not really. He just wanted a crack in the wall. And I gave it to him.”

I took a slow breath, forcing my voice to stay calm. “You were going to give them Echo and Chester? You were supposed to be our friend. You were supposed to protect all of us.”

He nodded miserably. “I know.”

“So why aren’t you dead yet?” Dominic snarled, stepping forward.

“Because I won’t let you kill him,” I said quietly. “And he is coward enough to be unable to end his own life.

Both men looked at me, stunned for different reasons.

“He is giving this confession because he wants one of us to kill him. I’m not doing this for him,” I added, eyes locked on Samir. “You betrayed us, and I hope that guilt eats you alive. But killing you won’t bring her suffering back. It won’t unmake the mistake. It won’t fix a goddamn thing.”

Samir closed his eyes. “Then what happens now?”

I straightened, every word a blade between my teeth.

My voice laced with my power, more potent, more primal now after my visit with the shaman.

“Now? You leave. You vanish. By morning, you and every trace of your existence better be gone from this house. I don’t care where you go and you no longer have any right to this place.

But if I ever see you again. If I even feel your presence near me or mine…

I won’t hesitate. No more mercy. No more forgiveness.

I will rip you limb from limb with my bare hands, Samir. I mean it.”

He nodded, slowly, like it was the one thing he’d been expecting all along.

“I truly am sorry,” he whispered.

“I’m not the one who needs your apology,” I replied. “But you’ll never get to give it to the one person who never deserved suffering from our curse, from any of it.”

The silence afterward was immense.

And in that silence, I turned away.

Dominic caught my arm gently, grounding me as the weight of everything sank in. My throat burned, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I didn’t shatter.

I had no more pieces left to fall.

We left Samir kneeling there in the hallway, the last echo of whatever trust had once existed between us evaporating with every step I took.

I prayed that he felt the sharp pain from each step I took away from him the same way I did.

And I hoped the fucker bled for eternity from it.